After 63 days at sea, and a total of 75 days out of the country, the Kiel Reese team on the Ross Sea expedition has finally returned home! This was an incredibly successful expedition for our group and the other science teams.
Let’s put this cruise into perspective with numbers. Over the nine weeks at sea, we ate a total of 189 meals (3 meals per day for 9 weeks) on the ship. Some meals on the ship included in the photo below are pizza, soup and mac and cheese, roasted chicken with mushrooms and mashed potatoes, tortellini and shrimp with soup, baked chicken and rice, soup and salad, lasagna and salad, tacos, curry shrimp with rice and salad.
The coring team, which included the Kiel Reese lab members as well as the TAMUCC group, had a total of 64 coring attempts, with 50 successful cores. The team retrieved both the longest sediment core and most total cores retrieved on the Research Vessel Ice Breaker (RVIB) Nathaniel B. Palmer! These cores ranged in size from 28 centimeters to a whopping 5.26 meters!
If all 50 cores were laid out end to end, they would measure 8,660 centimeters (equals 284.12 feet). To put this in perspective, the RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer is 308 feet long, so those core segments would almost be the full length of the ship!
After subsampling for future microbial analysis, there were a total of 308 whirl packs (sterile bags) of sediment samples.
Dr. Howe performed silica incubation experiments which will help determine the microbial role in the silica cycle. She was able to run nine experiments which resulted in 450 tubes of sediment-seawater slurry, 450 tubes of filtrate, and 450 filters.
There was a total of 21 CTD casts. Remember that a CTD, which stands for Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth, is a collection of bottles attached to a metal ring that are triggered to close at certain depths by a computer. There were 24 bottles, each holding 12 liters of water, on this CTD and after 21 casts or deployments, that meant that 6048 liters, or 1598 gallons, were collected during this expedition!
The dredge team from Bowling Green State University had 50 dredge deployments- again, a record for a single cruise on the RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer- while the invertebrate team had 24 sampling events, which led to a collection of over 9,000 critters!
After the flight home, which took approximately 24 hours, we are ready to reflect on the success of the cruise and regroup to begin the long-term processing of these samples which will be done over the next several months.
Thank you for following along on our journey.
This research expedition is funded by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs (award number 2044453 to Dr. Brandi Kiel Reese).